Same for me, and I have had better luck with enjoying early access games than most full release games. Valheim is the stand out example for me, but there arena couple others with hundreds of hours of fun! It also helps that indie early access games tend to be less expensive.
Then there is the case of Multiversus, which was way more fun to play in prerelease than it is now. On top of that they cranked up the intrusive monetization, so getting to the less fun gameplay is a slog.
Then there is Tekken 8, which launched ok and then added a shitty shop and annoying seasons shortly after release. It also seems like the networking has gottenn worse.
But every early access game where I was clear on expectations has been fun and always feels worth the money.
As a third party user, I also see the icon only on feddit.io view of the community and not on the lemmy.world view of the community (or on midwest.social). In fact, I don’t see any icon on LW or MS, just feddit.
I wonder if the community had it up last month and the change to the icon didn’t federate.
It has had a lot of polish aince the beta last year, and the store stuff/season pass microtransaction hell was dialed down. The first season pass appears to be free, not sure how they will handle that stuff in the future.
It is still fun to play although all the flashy daily stuff and the awkward menu navigation is atill annoying.
The author apparently doesn’t know that BG3 (and a lot of other games) has an honour mode that doesn’t allow save scumming, so people can choose to play the exact same way if they want to.
I was always impressed by how creative the artwork made out of text were. Yeah, most were made by a program that converted pics to text, but that was automating something that was already being done and they had to pick and choose art that would convert clearly.
If the mtx is meaningless because you can get it easily in game, then it is predatory as it is intended to be purchased by people who are not aware that they can earn it in game. That strikes me as worse than mtx that is required to do something they can’t without it, because it preys on people’s lack of information and they aren’t making an informed choice.
Unless the entire game is developed by an independent studio and is entirely funded on microtransactions, buying micro transactions is just there for more company profit on top of the regular game sales by stripping content out of a full release. It isn’t supporting the development.